Male preschool teacher students negotiating masculinities: a qualitative study with men who are studying to become preschool teachers.Early Child Development and Care, 187 (7) AbstractThe overall interest is to understand how men who study preschool teaching negotiate masculinities. Earlier research shows how male teachers negotiate masculinities when being in and entering a predominantly feminine work area, such as early childhood education (see for example Simpson 2014, Brody 2015, Pirard, Schoenmaeckers & Camus 2015. It this article Connell's notion on hegemonic masculinity is reflected on in terms of negotiation. Semi-structured interviews with three main questions were conducted with 38 men attending the preschool teacher training programmes at three Swedish universities/university colleges. The result show two main themes for negotiation that were called 'Becoming and being a 'breaker'' and 'Coping with sticking out'. These themes and their content are presented and discussed in the article.Keywords: masculinities, male student, negotiation, preschool, early childhood education, gender IntroductionThe overall interest is to understand how men who study preschool teaching negotiate masculinities. Specifically, our aim is to analyse and explore how this negotiation is expressed through how the challenges male preschool teacher students express concerning their studies and their future profession. We will argue that these challenges relate to the conflict between how to display critical hegemonic masculinity while simultaneously being a professional preschool teacher. Further, we will argue that this conflict is demonstrated by the way these men express their position as a minority group and the expectations associated with that, while at the same time they 'break' certain male norms or notions how to be real men. These statements are discussed in this article.

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